As Calgary aims to place a tighter grip on its suburban expansion, developers and wary aldermen have consistently issued a warning: the city’s loss will be its neighbours’ gain, to our detriment.

The risk of residential development shifting from Calgary to surrounding communities comes with it the threat of losing property taxpayers, and facing more out-of-towners using the roads, transit and other services they’re not helping to pay for.

“Leapfrogging development — it’s a question that disturbs me lately,” Ald. John Mar said last week as council debated a contentious new growth strategy to sequence new Calgary edge communities.

But ask the mayors of those other towns about it, and they say they’re not any keener to take on a surge of new residential homes from an industry frustrated with Calgary.

“I’ve seen Calgary looking to mitigate its sprawl. As part of the Calgary Regional Partnership, we’re committed to doing the same,” said Chestermere Mayor Patricia Matthews.

Nearly all surrounding towns have joined Calgary in the partnership’s own long-term growth plan that seeks to limit the spread of every municipality’s urban footprint.

Okotoks has long had a ceiling on growth because of its limited water supply, although it’s lately decided to pursue more water and development. Cochrane last week declared its own plan to constrain its sprawl.

“This old idea of needing to have a 30-year land supply is archaic and it’s very expensive for taxpayers in the sense that we’re subsidizing developers through a number of those types of policies,” said Cochrane Mayor Truper McBride, echoing language used by his Calgary counterpart.

And should Calgary developers, who protest red tape in the city’s system, want to build more homes outside Calgary, they face different hurdles elsewhere: rural municipalities don’t want subdivisions with the same density as Calgary’s, and Chestermere won’t let builders put up anything smaller than 45-foot-wide lots, despite consistent pleas, Matthews said.

Her town wants to keep its unique nature and appeal by providing larger lots than Calgary typically does, but the big city will always retain its obvious advantages.

“Why you would potentially walk away from that is beyond me,” Matthews said.

Calgary accounts for three-quarters of all new single-family homes started in the region, and that number has stayed the same for has the past five years, according to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. data.

One-quarter of the Calgary region’s growth will happen in surrounding towns between 2006 and 2039, according to the regional partnership’s population forecast.

McBride doesn’t expect that to change.

“I don’t see the city adopting more progressive policies around growth and development to be an issue at all.”

Last week, Calgary debated a policy shift that would use a new ranking formula to determine when new communities get greenlit for startup. Two years ago when a council committee first began charting this new course, a lawyer for major landowner Walton International warned: other towns would be “eager to siphon off Calgary’s tax base” if the city scared away businesses.

Ald. Andre Chabot sees it as a big risk, if Calgary doesn’t provide enough choice in affordable new homes within the city.

“Then we have to provide a lot of the infrastructure upgrades — i.e., grade-separated interchanges — a lot sooner than we would have, because volumes become so high for people coming into our city to work, play, shop, you name it,” he said.

Ald. Druh Farrell said she doesn’t want that risk to deter Calgary’s plans.

“That seems to be a rationale for doing the same old thing,” she said during the latest growth debate.

City planners told council last week that they need to study the acceptable amount of “leakage” to surrounding jurisdictions. But with those towns developing their own employment centres, not all newcomers are treating them as mere bedroom communities, said Chris Jacyk, key spokesman for the growth management strategy.

Chestermere’s focus isn’t luring more residential growth — it wants more industrial and office projects to help boost that small part of its tax base, Matthews said.

The other towns can’t grow on much bigger scales because their services aren’t funded with the help from the lucrative businesses property taxes that Calgary gets, Calgary Ald. Gian-Carlo Carra said.

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